Spring bulbs — which we should be planting now — have the unfortunate habit of flowering early in the season and then dying back up by Memorial Day.

Most perennial flowers, on the other hand, have the drawback of starting slowly but flourishing later.

Sounds like a good marriage to me.

Few gardeners fuss with mixing and matching bulbs and perennials, though.

We prefer to keep perennials with perennials and bulbs by themselves — if we plant any bulbs at all.

Granted, it takes much skill (or good luck) to match bulbs and perennials.

Now there’s some scientific help from researchers at Cornell University, who spent the last four years doing the trial and error for us.

Led by Cornell professor Dr. William Miller, the team tried dozens of bulb/perennial combos.

The goal was simple: “To document what works and what doesn’t in a typical spring garden,” says Miller.

The idea is to have bulbs come up and flowers while the perennial foliage is just beginning to wake up for the season.

Then, as the bulb foliage yellows on its way to summer dormancy, the perennial leaves grow up and over to hide the rattiness.

The more the leaf textures, colors and blooms complement one another the better.

Miller says that Cornell researchers weren’t necessarily looking for bulbs and perennials that bloom at the same time. He says they were looking at overall performance — or in other words, plantings that danced well together.

That came down largely to what the two partners were doing at the same time throughout spring.

One of Cornell’s favorite examples was pairing the April-blooming hyacinth “Jan Bos” with the dark-leafed, summer-flowering perennial penstemon “Husker Red.”

The dark-purple emerging leaves of “Husker Red” make a nice foliage underplanting while the hyacinths bloom their heads off in rosy-pink. As the hyacinths fade, “Husker Red” takes off and overtakes most of the space before the hyacinth leaves yellow.

Another winner was tulip, “Queen of Night;” and sedum, “Matrona.” The nearly black blooms of ‘Queen of Night’ looked great with the blood-red leaves of the sedum, which then grows over the tulip foliage on its way to a September bloom.

Not everything plays nicely together, as you might have already discovered. Cornell’s testers ran into their share of losing combos.

One big problem was timing: either the perennials were too slow to hide the bulb foliage later or they came up too big too fast and overtook the bulbs while they were still flowering.

An example of that was pairing daffodils with butterfly weed (Asclepias tuberosa). The daffodils bloomed and were already turning yellow before the butterfly weed did much of anything.

Another challenge is the size of the two plants. The bulbs have to be tall enough to grow above the emerging perennial foliage, and the perennial foliage also has to be tall enough later to hide the yellowing bulb leaves.

Failures in that test were spreading campanula and basket-of-gold (Aurinia) — two perennials that are so short that they don’t hide anything.

A third challenge is spacing. Plant too many bulbs and they crowd out the perennials. Plant too few and you get a sparse display.

Cornell’s researchers also scratched off perennials with semi-evergreen foliage that looks partly brown in early spring (it detracts from the bulb display), and they found that some bulbs fizzle out and fade away after a year or two in the ground (primarily a problem with many tulips).

If you want to see more on this hands-on study, go to www.hort.cornell.edu/combos.

For more on using bulbs in the landscape, go to www.bulb.com.

Here are a few more Cornell-favorite bulb-perennial pairings:

Allium, “Ivory Queen;” and Aster macrophyllus.

Daffodil, “Fortissimo;” and poppy, “Turkenlouis.”

Daffodil, “Pink Charm;” and cimicifuga, “Brunette.”

Daffodil, “Salome;” and phlox, “Bill Baker.”

Tulip, “Don Quichotte;” and geranium, “Claridge Druce.”

Tulip, “Negrita;” and lamb’s ears.

Tulip, “Parade;” and white, old-fashioned bleeding heart.

Otherwise, get out there and experiment yourself. Now through early November is prime time to plant spring bulbs in central Pennsylvania’s climate.

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